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An anonymous reader tips this news from IndieDB:
"Alien Arena: Reloaded Editionhas been released. This is a major release of this game, with many new features, and a veritable truckload of new high quality content. Every aspect of the game has been improved upon and expanded, from the engine, to the game code, weaponry, and overall gameplay. Some of the new features for this release include: Many new rendering features; Twelve new/rebuilt levels; Two new player characters, the Overlord and Warrior; Brand new 'super' weapon, the Minderaser; Improved antilag code; "Simple" items rendering option; Improved and expanded movement; Improved Bot AI, particularly with CTF; New music, and music 'shifts' in game situations; and a variety of bug fixes and code cleansing. Alien Arena is free to download, free to play, and the code is open sourced, and that will never change."

You didn't intend to, but you just showed how useless source code is for ordinary users.. Why, you might ask. Let me tell you.

God mode is done much faster by doing it the ordinary way. You either use cheat code or you use the combo of Cheat Engine+Ollydbg to disable functions that decrease health. Both of these things are done much faster this way, and to both open and closed source games. There is no reason for the source code here.

No, it is not useless, and let me show you why. The only game which I really like and still play is Doom2. Since I play it just to shoot monsters, and I play it once every two years, I like to have unlimited ammo. Ages ago, when I was playing the purchased copy, I had to keep a sheet of paper with the cheat codes, so that I can look em up when necessary.

These days, I play the Risen3D clone. Not only am I able to enjoy shooting at ugly 3D monsters, but I don't have to remember codes, because the game is now

That's a bad example because it gives you nothing. Make or use a trainer and you can get god mode with one single key press. Now you just switched from commands to commands, the only difference being that it now shows you the command as you write. Was that so huge change?

You're trying too hard not to get the point, so I'll make it even harder.

Opensource is great, because since Doom2 was opensourced, the game has improved a lot.

I can enjoy nicer effects and shooting ugly 3D monsters instead of ugly sprites. The icing on the cake are the mnemonic commands, which allow me to enjoy fully those rare moments when I have time for the game without having to look things up or do even more complicated things like "making or using a trainer", whatever that is.

Yes, I do. Assuming I just downloaded it, I don't think you'll be able to close source it on me.

That doesn't follow. The version you downloaded will be open source, but nothing prevents the authors from adding features and releasing it with a different license.The "never" is incorrect - or rather only correct if you assume that all future development will happen under that license. There are enough examples of software that has gone closed source to invalidate that claim as speculative.

The problem here is that there's no money to be made from free [freedomdefined.org] video games, which in the present capitalist system of things means no way to put a roof over the developers' heads and food in their children's stomachs apart from a bounty system like Kickstarter. Though selling support works for some kinds of business software, games that aren't massively multiplayer tend to need far less support from the publisher. Furthermore, the game consoles tend to have explicit anti-copyleft policies [slashdot.org]. See previous posts by jcnnghm [slashdot.org], turbidostato [slashdot.org], and alexo [slashdot.org].

in the present capitalist system of things means no way to put a roof over the developers' heads and food in their children's stomachs apart from a bounty system like Kickstarter.

No offense, but your argument boils down to, "I've never seen anything successful and therefore nothing successful can be done". 10 years ago "bounty systems like Kickstarter" were rare and those that were around were not successful. Even free to play games were rare because the idea of selling in-game items had not been tried. Who would think that someone would pay for a digital flower?

New business models require forward thinking people. Money people are not usually forward thinking. They like to copy

games that aren't massively multiplayer tend to need far less support from the publisher

Even free to play games were rare because the idea of selling in-game items had not been tried. Who would think that someone would pay for a digital flower? [...] The sale of vanity items in multiplayer games can fund development.

I don't see how selling items could work in a Free game that isn't MMO. If the game is Free, someone could just hack the game to give himself the item in a non-massive mode such as living room multiplayer, LAN multiplayer, or private server online multiplayer.

But just to get you thinking, imagine a multi-player game which has updates every 2 weeks. If you don't have the latest copy you can't play with others.

Yes you can: just play a non-massive mode.

An automatic update subscription costs $48 a year billable in increments. Yes you can wait a few days and find someone willing to give it to you for free, but wouldn't you rather pay for a subscription?

If the game is Free, it wouldn't take a few days. Someone would script up an automatic mirror in one of the P languages and have a delay of no more than an hour.

Single player serialized content has similar potential if it is well made.

It was actually the first movie cut into 5 segments in order to get you to go to the theater 4 more times then you should have to. Unfortunately, this plan backfired and most people stopped caring about the movie after sitting through it a second or third time. They then turned the franchise to marketing towards the 7 and under crowd who won't have a chance of understanding the concepts but are excited because the few strokes of genius initially released got Daddy excited.

The Windows installer will also try to install the crawler toolbar. Supposedly it lets you uncheck the boxes but they are checked by default. This is BAD behavior in my opinion. If they want to recommend it and leave them unchecked to start with (i.e. you must opt IN not OUT) that is acceptable.

The Windows installer will also try to install the crawler toolbar. Supposedly it lets you uncheck the boxes but they are checked by default. This is BAD behavior in my opinion. If they want to recommend it and leave them unchecked to start with (i.e. you must opt IN not OUT) that is acceptable.

You're talking to the Slashdot crowd. If they use Windows, they should already be experience enough to always check each installation screen of anything they install for such traps. Even programs which try to bundle Google Chrome I would consider to be nefarious.

In fact, I have yet to see a software installer in a long time which, when giving the user to install this bundled garbage, has the checkboxes off by default. They're always opt-in. Clearly this suggests people don't WANT this shit, but the develope

Then they'll argue that this is the only way they can fund things like the program's web site.

To defeat that argument, you'll eventually have to demonstrate a way of funding the development of freely licensed software intended for non-business use without installing this sort of adware. The "selling support" method works only for MMO games, not for single-player, living room multiplayer, or LAN multiplayer games.

Don't know what links you clicked, but if you start with a link in the post, go to end of article, click tohttp://red.planetarena.org/ [planetarena.org]

then click the download button, take your pick of sites (of which Desura is one choice). It's easier to do than to write how to do it.

I'm downloading the tarball now, and was not asked or required to install anything to do so. Alien Arena (didn't check version) is also available via the Ubuntu Software Center; can be installed from community-supported applications in Cr

Now, like a lot of other open-source multiplayer FPSes (Xonotic, Warsow, World of Padman), all we need are people actually PLAYING them online and we'll be set. Bonus points for active players here in Australia.

I agree entirely. I'm not sure about Alien Arena, but I have noticed with a few of these open source FPS games, particularly AssaultCube (I used to love playing AssaultCube), a certain social phenomena will occur where only a handful of the "elite" developers, contributors, and players will be recognized and their ideas accepted as okay to be part of the game. Anything which conflicts with their interests is deemed bad for the game, even if the larger portion of their user base prefers these "bad" ideas.